Lately, articles in the press argued that social class has become an irrelevant issue in today’s economic and political scenario. I tend to disagree. In spite of the prevailing principles of egalitarianism, we still look at each other as holders of ranks or small units of power.
People can be compared to peacocks in the sense that they tend to take joy in displaying to friends and potential mates just how wonderful they are. Beneath the veneer of the skin of each and every one of us we can find traces of the haughtiness and vanity displayed by Mrs Bucket in the television serial Keeping Up Appearances.
Firms are adept at exploiting these traces by making us indulge in conspicuous consumption by means of which we may express our differences or distinction from others. Of course, we are not that naïve to do it in the same grotesque and risible way of Mrs Bucket, who goes to great lengths to achieve superiority in terms of consumption and commodities even at the expense of her social relationship with her kin.
What this different level of consumption implies is that there are some people who, due to their income and position in the labour market, can get a greater share of the social and economic rewards which society bestows to its members. This is where social class comes in. The emphasis on the position in the labour market makes one’s occupation the major criterion of class. The labour market gives different values to the skills, knowledge and competencies commensurate with the jobs it demands.
A surgeon whose skills and competences are highly valued by society is given high status and high pay. On the other hand, the labourer who does not need any expertise to perform his duties is given low status and low pay. These are the two extreme poles in the International Classification of Occupations (ISCO) delineating the occupations into nine different categories (displayed in the table below) on which the statistics about gainful employment issued by the National Statistic Office and the Employment and Training Corporation are based.
This classification, which gives justification to different scales of income, can be defined as a hierarchical form of occupations that stratifies society into social classes. The middle class, as the term implies, must lie in the middle of this conundrum. The problem is where to make the cut off point. In other words, at which point does the middle class start and where does it end in this hierarchical framework?
The two upper classes (ISCO 1 and 2) and two lower (ISCO 8 and 9) would not qualify as middle. That leaves us with five different categories that are in between these two top and bottom categories. However, according to the labour force statistics (LFS) the average annual income of the service and shop and sales workers is very close to that of the elementary and lower than that of the plant and machine operators and assemblers. Thus, though being on scale 5 of the occupational classification, it is difficult to group this category of workers with the middle class.
On the other hand, according to LFS, the average gross annual salary of the plant and machine operators and assemblers is on a par with that of the clerks. However, the former, besides being highly routinised and controlled, is a dead-end job with little or no prospects of advancement
On the basis of this argument, the middle class comprises four categories of workers (ISCO 3, 4, 6 and 7). As can be deduced from the above table, during this decade (2003 -2012), in percentage terms of the total occupied persons, this middle class decreased from 40.5 per cent in 2003 to 38.5 per cent in 2012. It is still, however, the largest group comprising a very wide range of occupations each of which has different characteristics from the other.
The ones nearer the higher group (can we refer to them as the upper middle?) generally reveal a higher level of consciousness about status which, in turn, generates higher aspirations of intra social mobility (mobility within one’s career). However, this group of workers is wary that the latest trends in wage setting have set them apart rather than nearer to the two top groups in the highest echelon of ISCO classification (ISCO 1 and 2) who, during this decade (2003–2012), in percentage terms have increase from 19 per cent to 24.8 per cent.
On the other hand, the groups nearer to the lower scales are wary that the ones at the bottom are catching up with them. The introduction of electronic surveillance and panoptic devices have made their work more controlled and routinised so that their conditions of work are getting similar to those at the bottom of the ISCO scales. Thus, the middle class workers can, in one way or another, feel that they are on highly slippery ground – threatened by the ones at the top who are widening the differences and the ones at the bottom who are encroaching on them.
What may assuage the plight of these individuals is that they are living in a household with a double income. In one way or another, the two earner family, which is slowly but surely becoming a norm, smoothens the rough edges of the social stratification system by helping family members to maintain a level of consumption that provides them with a fair degree of gratification. How class is perceived by individuals depends on one’s occupation and income as well as on other latent factors such as aspirations, level of education and the social and economic context of their household.
Dismissing social class as being an outdated concept wrapped up in the time of Marx may be too simplistic. Class still matters and it will continue to be a battleground in the economic and political scenario for years to come.